by St. Pierre-Julien Eymard
This question is not often heard. But that is not right; for if it is well to ask ourselves whether we love God, it is also very useful to convince ourselves that God loves us.
I. Yes, God loves us! He loves us with an eternal love, which has neither beginning nor end, neither succession nor vicissitude. We are eternal in His love. From all eternity before we had any existence, God had conceived us in His thought, willed us in His decrees, and it was a thought and a decree of love!
Ah! we shall never love Him as He has loved us. We may dilate our love, extend it, carry it beyond all bounds, but we shall always be in arrears of gratitude, always in a debt of love. Alas! we do not love Him. even during the short moments of this life, which He leaves us freely to prove our gratitude, while He has loved us from all eternity! Here we find the source of those inconsolable tears of the saints on earth – the present hardly suffices to respond to His present love. How, then, satisfy the weight of love accumulated during endless ages? This impossibility to love sufficiently, to repair their defect of love, is the torment of the saints. They are inconsolable. The world does not understand their tears.
Naturally, it must be so, for we scarcely shed tears enough over our sins to obtain pardon for them. But the saints wept for not having employed all their time in loving; and if they have offended God, their tears are never dried. Behold Saint Peter pardoned, confirmed in grace, the Head of the Church, and yet he wept incessantly. Morning found him on his knees bathed in the tears that had dug a double furrow on his emaciated cheeks by the incurable wound of his repentance. Oh, how great is our misery! Scarcely a few acts of contrition to repair lost love, love offended! Alas! it is love that lights and feeds the fire of the damned, and their most cutting regret is for not having loved.
God’s eternal love is manifested for us by the benefits of time. We exist only by a benevolent creation of God’s love, and we are preserved only because He bears us in His arms.
Besides, this life is given us only to love God. Man’s perfection consists in that. He is good only if he loves God. This is the end fixed for him by the Creator in His loving liberality. And so it seems that, if God did not say of man when creating him, that this work of His hands was good, as He had said of all the others, it was because man will be truly finished and perfect only when he shall have loved God and proved his love by his works.
There is on the part of God as much condescension in wishing to be loved by us, in giving us the faculty and the grace to love Him, as in loving us Himself and loading us with testimonies of His love.
II. Created in His love, it is His love that redeems us. He condescends to our nature, to the need of our heart; and because our love has become materialized, no longer loving anything but the sensible, God accepts us such as we are, making Himself sensible in order to replace in our love the sensible idols to which we consecrated it.
Listen to this council of love : “Which of Us will go to man?” that is, which of the three Divine Persons, eternal, essentially spiritual, will become love, human love, sensible and visible, to gain man? For his heart is caught only by this means. “And the Word was made flesh, Caro.” We see, we understand only love, for the word itself indicates it. The Holy Spirit might have said man, He was made man. But no, flesh! That is a more sensible love, one more conformed to our own heart of flesh: “Caro factum est.“
And Jesus Christ is only God’s love humanized, given to men in all possible ways, under all forms and conditions, to prove to him the love of his Creator. How can we doubt that God loves us when the Word has come to tell it to us by His speech, His eyes, His Heart, by everything that man can feel and understand?
God Blessing the Earth, Benvenuto Tisi, c. 1500
His only purpose in coming was to tell us: ”Sic Deus dilexit — God has so loved
the world. ” He loves us, He loves us as God, that is, infinitely! He has taken into His Heart all the various forms of love that move us, and He has given us proofs of it.
Parental love being the most natural and the strongest, because it is wrapped up with the blood and the sources of life, Jesus has called Himself our Father, and He has made Himself our Brother.
Friendship, based on equality of position and character, being one form of love, He has become our Friend. The love of parents supposes some inequality, a certain distance of fear and respect, but Jesus loves us as a Brother and a Friend; consequently, all distinctions and distance disappear. With Him we share the same condition, the same name, the same table, the same life. And if He willed to be born an infant and to pass through all the ages of life, it was that in every state, at all periods of their life, all men may have in Him a Brother and behold God’s love humanized and like unto their own.
It was not enough for Him to become like unto us in nature; He would share our trials, our miseries, our sufferings, that we might be overcome by that evidence and forced to cry out “Yes, God has loved us!” And He has done so. He has taken all my sins on Himself, borne them alone, and accepted their terrible chastisement – interior trials, pains of soul, horrible sufferings of body, His interior and exterior Passion! Behold the proofs of His love. Is this enough? Shall we deny a love that is proved by sufferings and death? Ah! who would do what He has done? No one no one! Shall we be unjust toward God alone, and shall we not acknowledge that He loves us?
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III. Yes, He loves us, but it would not suffice for Him to love us in general, as a whole. That would, indeed, be much, and even sufficient to save us. But He wills to go even to the end of infinite love, and so He loves us personally, individually, as if we were, each one, the only one in the world.
If some one would say to you: “God willed to love you, and to prove it He created this world with all its wonders for you alone. You are sufficient for Him. You alone are the end of all His works of nature, grace, and glory.” If God Himself should add: “I will give My only Son for you. He will die for you. He will establish the Church and His Sacraments for you; and again for you He will abide in the Blessed Sacrament until the end of the world, continuing therein His life of love for you, and incessantly renewing therein His Passion and His death for the love of you. All this is for you alone.” — If some one should tell you this, if God Himself should assure you of it, would you believe him? And if after that, it had to be acknowledged that you will not love Him, that all those benefits will not be able to gain your love, — ah! what would you reply? No, there could be no response to that. You would lower your eyes, you would blush, you would experience a feeling worse than that of the demons!
And yet, it is so. God’s love for every one of us is personal. In all His works, He had but each one of us in view. All creatures are at the service of every one of us, as well as all graces, all treasures of sanctificaiion, all the marvels of grace. Every one should cry out with Saint Paul, ”Dilexit me! He has loved me,” me, me alone, and to prove His love for me, “He has delivered Himself for me,” for me alone, to the death of the Cross! With how much stronger reason has He made all other things, visible and invisible, for me, for me alone!
And all that love of God may be summed up, condensed, vouched for in the gift that God made me of His Son, that Jesus Christ made me of Himself in Holy Communion. I am His end. He finishes by uniting Himself to me! All, then, was for me, and for me alone! All since the beginning of the world, and before, has prepared that Gift of personal love He makes me of His Body, His Blood, His Soul, and His Divinity, of all that He is, all that He has, for all ends in me, in my heart, in my soul.
Christian, behold your price— God Himself! “Tanti vales, quanti Deus!”
Oh I after such love, I can understand hell…
And man does not love God! He offends Him! Ah! God brings contempt on Himself by dint of loving. One might say that He sought it! Would you allow yourselves to be thus despised and insulted by your children, your subordinates? God showers man with riches, loads him with benefits in spite of his sins, his daily sins! It is that he may return to Him, be conquered by Him.
We must have the hearts of demons not to love God!
And Our Lord shields the ingrates, excuses them- “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and this while they are cursing Him! No, God has no more dignity, no more honor, He has love only!
I cannot think of that. It tortures me! One would wish to kill himself for love!
The demon cried out one day by the mouth of a possessed: “You men, God has loved you too much!”
That is true! The good God made a mistake! He has loved us too much! “Propter nimiam charitatem qua dilexit nos — For His exceeding charity wherewith He loved us.”
St. Pierre-Julien Eymard was a French priest and the founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament. A friend of St. John Vianney, he developed an intense devotion to the Eucharist over the course of his life. Because of his desire to spread this devotion, he became known as The Apostle of the Eucharist. Eymard was beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1962. You can learn more about St. Pierre-Julien Eymard in a biography about him, found at this affiliate link.